Tf you want to realize what this 
untry’s great Out of Doors is, get 
it in this country’s great American 
ert, way out in the fearful heat 
18 ste, witch the train pull out and 
you, and then sit down and let 
@ awfulness of solitude and desola- 
n soak in. 
“One cannot conceive of the heart 
ss, home sickness and awful 
meness of this desolate waste 
he has become a part of it. 
eat ravens sail overhead, hairy tar- 
itulas bask in the awful heat, the 
eadly rattler and the lizards crawl 
er the hot sands. Solitude and 
eat—desolation. 
And what a desert. It commences 
D in Idaho and continues to the Gulf 
f California, and parts of Idaho, 
Tyoming, Utah, Nevada and Cali- 
ornia are in its grasp. Its most grue- 
ne, and deadly corner is Death 
alley, in California. I had intended 
visit this spot but I stopped off in 
izona, and I saw enough desert 
te to last me for one trip. 
We have an impression that a des- 
rt is one great stretch of level sand, 
here not a sign of vegetation ever 
s, but this impression is very far 
rom the real conditions. The Ameri- 
n desert is full of great valleys, 
ntain ranges, sandy wastes, ex- 
volcanos, lava flows, cactus, sun- 
e, heat and desolation. 
picked out a spot that looked lone- 
yme and far away on the map—well 
it in Arizona—and I found it was 
that the map portrayed it. I 
ned that the west bound train 
Opt aah there to let the limited by and 
t at night a local stopped—I don’t 
iow why, unless for the accommoda- 
on of fellows as foolish as myself. 
The town marked on the map as a 
lation was simply a section place, 
mere a white man kept a dozen 
reasers and a handcar. 
The trains passed and vanished, 
nd there I stood, in the Great Ameri- 
in Desert, with not a living or mov- 
ig thing visible. I had thought I 
ould stay over night at the section 
pase and have nearly two full days 
) see the big waste, but before that 
in was out of sight it was nix for 
le, and could I have by any means 
‘Teached it, someone else could have 
1 my desert description job. 
The section gang was off some- 
NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
THE LAND OF THIRST. 
tories of Arizona Desert Life—a part of America’s Great Sahara. 
a Our Country's Great Dead Land. 
(By M. J. Brown, Eprror Lirr.e Vauuey, N. Y., Hus) 
where trying to figure some scheme 
to make ties keep their places in dry 
sand, and reduce railroad wrecks, and 
I was all there was of China. I was 
the census. 
Marking the place where the sec- 
tion house was by a big bluff near it, 
I struck out on foot to ‘“‘do the des- 
ert,” and remembering the many tales 
I had heard of the strange fascina- 
tions of this land of thirst, and how 
the strange-colored ranges and the 
glistening sands lead one on, | kept 
the low gear, working and my eye on 
that bluff near the depot—that one 
mark of something close to the living. 
Fity years ago this desert was 
better known than today—when the 
lure of California gold strewed these 
vast, arid wastes with human bones. 
Today we ride through on a limited, 
fret at the heat and dust, look out the 
windows at the bunches of cacti, and 
go home and say we have been in the 
great American desert. 
But in those days no streaks of steel 
crossed this awful waste, and while I 
sat there hour after hour waiting for 
the section men to return, I blotted 
the Santa Fe off the map and went 
back to 49. 
And what a picture my imagination 
produced. A picture of caravans 
plodding across this burning waste, 
of men with fear in their hearts and 
thirst in their veins; of plodding 
oxen and mules dragging across this 
desolation with protruding tongues 
and blistering and cracked hoofs; of 
the desert buzzards in lazy pursuit, 
waiting for someone to die; of the 
drawn faces of the women and the 
thirst delirum of the children—and 
then the end, and the ghastly human 
bones that whiten there today. 
It seems to me that the penal places 
or other countries would be pleasure 
resoits compared with American’s 
Sahara. I could picture the mines of 
Siberia, the Yucatan rubber forests, 
and the desert of Australia as Coney 
Island laid side by side with this spot 
of America. If a man-proof fence 
was run around a thousand acres of 
this Arizona and the criminals of our 
country dumped into it, hell would 
quit business in thirty days because it 
could not meet competition. 
I had not wound my watch, and I 
had nothing by which to judge time, 
for strange to relate, the sky was en- 
81 
tirely covered with clouds—an un- 
usual sight in the desert. I dared not 
get out of sight of the railroad and 
could not tell when the train would 
come, and when I looked down the 
track to the west and saw a dot that 
I knew was a hand car, well, I knew 
something of how those caravans 
must have felt when they found an 
oasis. 
The section boss was a grizzled 
white man who had served fifteen 
years in teaching the Mexicans to 
drive spikes, and after I had coached 
him a little on the English language, 
he recalled that he was once a white 
man, and he told me many interesting 
things about the desert. 
There is a weird fascination in this 
arid waste that almost any visitor will 
admit, and none can explain. There 
is a something that entices, that calls 
to you to come on. No matter how 
cautious a man, he wants to go just a 
little farther, just over to the next 
draw. He doesn’t know what he is 
looking for, but he expects something 
-—something lures him on, beckons to 
him, 
The section man told me that some 
of his own Mexicans, men reared to 
the desert, had wandered off from 
the railroad, at different times, and 
never returned. And then he cinched 
it by the statement that they never re- 
turned for their month’s pay. | 
knew that ‘their bones were some- 
where out there in that waste. 
Before, behind, everywhere _ this 
dead country stretches away. It was 
created for something, but only God 
knows what. With the patience of 
ages the desert winds have used the 
white sand to chisel the rock and the 
lava into weird shapes and present- 
ments. ‘There is not a corner, not an 
edge, nothing sharp everything is 
smoothed, rounded sandpapered—ev- 
erything smells of age, of a time be- 
fore lite. Rock-strewn, empty, vast, 
mysterious, silent. 
What is hidden out in these wastes. 
Gold, silver, copper, and all the rich 
minerals that are characteristic of a 
land that has been forced up from 
earth’s bowels. And mother earth 
has set the time lock on them. None 
know how many a gaunt form has 
laid down to die in this hostile land, 
lured on and on by the gold fever, on 
beyond human aid, and where na- 
ture refused to help. Starving coy- 
otes have picked the bones clean, and 
the dryest air on earth has preserved 
them as sign boards— ‘Abandon all 
hope ye who enter here.” 
The section foreman told me he had 
lived fifteen years in this torment and 
that in one more year he would have 
